The Chinese characters are a translation of the title of the song as well as one of the lyric phrases of the song "Cheery Blossom Snow". I made a text movie brush from jpgs I made from a font. Some are randomly applied (like the color early sequence) some more rigid and applied along the line of a region brush. I also wanted the straight line text to be a bit twitchy as it was applied. So I used the changing luminance of a specially made source movie to modulate the width and length of the brush. The net effect is a non-static line of text that has energy in it. It's funny I had to make and remake the luminance source movie 4 times to get it so it would twitch the text brush just enough but not enough to be distracting.

The swimming sequence was hard to work with. I was using a very low quality source video... and I worked long and hard to come up with an edge quality that worked for me. I had a lot of spurious paths flying off the edges of the figure. Since it was taking too much time to figure out how to paint it right the first time, I simply loaded my 1st pass render into a movie layer and hand cleaned up the frames with a black brush and some cloning. Then I took a few different incarnations of the footage and layer composited them in FCPX adding blur to some and adjusting saturation and exposure on others. I like the way she winds up feeling like a kind angel as she flies over the bustling urban neon night scene.